


a breath of sunlight

by troubadore



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Fluff, M/M, Soulmates, jaskier realizing he and geralt have been soulmates this ENTIRE GODDAMN TIME
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22297315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/troubadore/pseuds/troubadore
Summary: He’s just past thirty when he gives his heart to a witcher on a whim, because those lonely gold eyes look like they’ve seen too little love and Jaskier has nothing but his lute and his love to give.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 53
Kudos: 1457





	a breath of sunlight

**Author's Note:**

> and i'm back with more! god i love these two so much they have consumed my life orz
> 
> anyway timeline? canon? don't know her. all i know is that this is post-season 1 but jaskier and geralt reconciled after The Breakup and have been raising ciri together at kaer morhen and any other plot-relevant happening has been hand-waved to accommodate my needs

When he was a kid, Jaskier turned up his nose at the idea of finding his soulmate.

“You don’t want to meet them?” one of his friends—he doesn’t recall their name anymore, a time that seems so, so long ago—had asked, as they played with sticks in the streets in the town.

He remembers scrunching his face up, lips pursed as if he’d just eaten a lemon. "Why? So I can grow old and _die?_ That doesn’t sound very fun.”

And it didn’t—there was so much to _do,_ how could he possibly do it all in a single lifetime? Jaskier wanted to see the world, to travel and learn things and make a name for himself across all the countries and in all the cities and towns outside of the only one he’d ever known.

“I think it would get lonely,” another of his friends had said softly, looking off into the distance. “You’d meet so many people, maybe even love them, and then you’d have to watch them die when they found their own soulmates. You don’t think you’d want an end to it? Your own soulmate to love?”

Jaskier never did find a response to those questions that felt satisfactory. Of course he wanted someone to love! He wanted to love lots of someones, but he also didn’t want to wake up one day and find he couldn’t move for the arthritis in his joints, or the rattle in his chest as he breathed, or even remember his own name.

He isn’t the only one to scoff at it all, wanting instead to live forever, but it doesn’t sit right with him when the hunters come through, slitting the throats of the people unfortunate enough to have soulmates who’d rather they were murdered than grow old together. Jaskier wants to live, but not at the cost of his own soulmate’s life.

It doesn’t sit right with him but it doesn’t stop him from turning his eyes away and strumming louder notes on his lute when cries and screams fill the air as someone is beheaded for sharing a soul with the wrong kind of person.

He’s a coward like that.

Which is maybe why, when he turns twenty-five, and he’s still obviously aging where he should still look like a young-faced baby of eighteen, it seems only fair that the universe should curse him to have no soulmate at all, and his plans of living forever crumble at his feet.

And it’s not that he’s met his soulmate, he knows. Even if only in passing at a market, everyone knows if they’ve met their other half— _you feel it_ , they say, _somewhere deep in your bones and it’s like being able to breathe after being underwater for far too long, like the sun rising after the night ends._

Jaskier still feels choked by water making it hard to breathe, still sees darkness even in the middle of the day. It’s not because he’s found them, but because he has none at all.

It’s a rarity, and not a good one. Most people stop aging at eighteen, just on the cusp of adulthood, to wait for the other half of their soul so they can live together and grow old together and die together. It’s the ultimate achievement: meet your soulmate, and live, and die. Those that don't, that continue to age despite not meeting anyone they can call their own? It's because there isn't anyone for them; their soul is whole on its own and doesn't need another—or is so jagged and rough that no other will fit it, and why would destiny let a soft soul suffer that kind of pain?

Jaskier will live, and he will die, but he will never have a soulmate. His soul is too rough, too jagged for another to fit with it.

He tells himself he won’t let it bother him. So he won’t live forever—fine. He’ll just have to live the fullest life he can while he has it, and it will have to be enough. And for a time, it is: he travels and he plays and he sings and he loves and he loves and he loves, and it never fills the emptiness in his chest where his heart is supposed to be when he’s not throwing it at whoever smiles at him like he might just be something more to them than he is.

He’s just past thirty when he gives his heart to a witcher on a whim, because those lonely gold eyes look like they’ve seen too little love and Jaskier has nothing but his lute and his love to give.

He knows the tales of witchers, with no feelings and no souls and no soulmates—the mutagens deaden whatever bond might have been there, sever it like the head from any beast by a witcher’s silver sword, so they live long, lonely, empty lives.

 _Unnatural,_ people hiss in behind their hands, _evil and vile, no better than the monsters they hunt_ —before turning around and having their soulmates killed for immortality, and Jaskier thinks them hypocrites.

Geralt of Rivia has lived a long, lonely life, but Jaskier thinks he is far from empty.

He is lonely, but he craves companionship and compassion. Jaskier sees it in the way he talks to Roach, always soft, with gentle hands on her neck; in the way he holds himself surrounded by people, careful of his presence like just breathing might have him looking at his hands to see innocent blood on them; in the way he lets Jaskier follow him even when his words say otherwise, and the almost-smiles he gives when Jaskier plays something soft and just for them on the road.

Jaskier thinks their loneliness matches, jagged souls rough around the edges, craving love and eager to give it. He’s more than happy to let Geralt have all his love he wants.

Loving Geralt is like taking a deep breath after holding it for too long, like seeing the sun for the first time on a cloudless summer day after being in the dark. Jaskier looks at him and feels the empty space in his chest fill up with gold eyes and white hair and a body covered in scars, feels _complete_ for the first time that he can recall, and it seems like a cruel joke on destiny’s behalf to make him feel so much for someone who will outlive him by lifetimes.

For the first time in his life, Jaskier wishes he had a soulmate—not because he doesn’t still want to live forever, but because now his eventual death seems like a waste. Here he is, heart and soul belonging to a witcher that deserves nothing short of all the love in the world, and Jaskier will eventually pass on, leaving him alone yet again, taking his love with him. 

If he had a soulmate, Jaskier wouldn’t feel like he’s leaving Geralt behind in the end, teasing him with sweet promises only to disappear in the night—Yennefer does that enough for all of them.

But he doesn’t, so he plays his lute and sings songs and keeps following Geralt on the path laid out for him by destiny, and he keeps giving his love despite it all.

It’s Ciri that asks about him about his soulmate, holed up in Kaer Morhen and spending a rare day off from training by Jaskier’s side, listening to him pluck notes on his lute and hum suggestions of songs. Geralt is out doing...something that witchers do, probably, Jaskier wasn’t paying attention.

“What’s it like?” she asks, and Jaskier raises his eyebrows at her in question. “Having a soulmate, I mean.”

His throat closes up and a heavy feeling settles in his chest. He thinks of Geralt and pushes the thought away, swallowing thickly. “I—I don’t know,” he says, and his voice is rough with longing. He has to clear his throat. “I don’t have one. I mean, I don’t like drawing attention to them, but can’t you tell by the wrinkles around my eyes that I’m aging—” he smiles like he's making a joke of it, gestures around, “—and there’s no one around that could possibly be the cause of it? I’m getting old all by myself, thanks.” 

Ciri looks... _concerned_ comes to mind, but mostly confused, brow furrowed and lips pursed. “You don’t know, do you?”

Jaskier just looks at her. He doesn’t understand. “I don’t know what?”

“Jaskier,” she says slowly, gently, like he might spook if she speaks any louder, “you’ve looked the same as you always have for as long as I've known you.”

It makes him smile a little. “Well, thank you for your kindness, Ciri, but—”

“I’ve known you for fifty years, Jaskier,” she cuts him off quickly, but kindly. “Since Geralt found me and you were with him. And according to him, he’s known you at least half that many years before me.”

 _What?_ He doesn’t—he doesn’t understand. “What?”

She apparently realizes this is news to him—and oh, what news it is—because she smiles even more gently, almost playfully. “You have a soulmate, Jaskier,” she says, and Jaskier is, hysterically, glad she’s spelling it out for him. “And you’re living your life with him, like you’re supposed to. It’s just a little backwards from the norm. Sounds like him, doesn’t it?”

It’s like opening his eyes after being asleep: at first everything is blurry, but as he wakes up, it clears. Ciri’s words— _You have a soulmate, Jaskier—_ float in his head, circling his mind, finding parts to cling to.

_I have a soulmate._

Jaskier forces himself to look at Ciri—really _look_ at her—and when he finally _sees_ her it clicks: she’s grown up quite a bit, the round curves of childhood in her face now mature, more angular, though still soft. Her body is that of a woman’s, and while Jaskier could never find himself attracted _to_ her—gods, he’s basically her father, that would be too uncomfortable—he still recognizes that she _is_ attractive, in a way a woman is. Her eyes no longer shine with the innocence of youth, now more world-weary and wise, very much like Geralt’s on quiet nights around a campfire.

And Jaskier is _still here_. He’s still with them, still follows Geralt when he leaves Kaer Morhen to travel and slay beasts to make some coin—still sings his songs in taverns and sleeps on rough ground beneath the stars and it’s still not fun but his back doesn’t protest it and his joints don’t ache as he strums his lute, his steps still spry and lively as they’ve always been, no cough rattling his lungs when winter sets in, making it hard to breathe.

He _feels_ alive, as full and complete as he has since he fell in love in a tavern, stale bread in his pants and a yearning to tell the stories of a witcher who wanted to be loved.

“How?” he asks, breathes it into the air like it might break, like destiny might come down to him and laugh in his face and tell him it’s not true after all, he’s going to die any minute now and it will all have been for _nothing_ —

But perhaps destiny likes him a bit better than that, has always meant for this to be, because Ciri says, “The same reason my grandmother didn’t begin to age until she met Eist: it’s your destiny to be with him, Jaskier, and destiny wouldn’t separate you so soon.”

It’s...a comfort to hear it, that perhaps the reason he’d aged for the first part of his life wasn’t because he didn’t have a soulmate, but because he _did_ and that soulmate was a witcher, a being meant to live a long, long life. It was destiny telling him, _You will need to be more than a child to be with him as long as he needs you._

Oh.

_Oh._

Oh, to be needed by someone who fears being needed at all!

Jaskier realizes he _did_ know, like they all said he would: he knew it by the way looking at Geralt was like coming up for air, like being blinded by light. He felt it in his soul that this was the one he wanted to give his love to for the rest of his life.

_His soulmate._

“Well then,” Jaskier says, finally, settling back into his seat. He picks his lute up from where it had fallen out of his lap. Ciri looks at him curiously, and he gives her a smile. “I suppose, then, my answer is that having a soulmate is like being able to breathe after being underwater, and seeing light after a dark night.”

He looks up at movement in the door, and he smiles when Geralt comes in, dropping his swords and taking off his coat. Geralt raises an eyebrow at him, mouth quirked at the corner, like he’s asking a question— _What’s going on in here?_ probably—and Jaskier feels at peace. He turns back to Ciri, strumming thoughtful notes out into the air.

“It’s seeing them and wanting to give all your love to them, because they deserve it and it’s all you have to give, and following them wherever their path takes them because there’s nowhere else in the world you’d rather be than by their side...”

He lets himself talk as Geralt comes to sit next to him, and Jaskier leans into him as he waxes poetic to Ciri about what it’s like to have a soulmate—because he _does,_ and isn’t that just a hell of a thing?

Really, having a soulmate is the greatest adventure out there, and Jaskier thinks his child self would forgive him for wanting one of his own if he knew it would be Geralt of Rivia. 

**Author's Note:**

> hit me up [@troubadorer](http://twitter.com/troubadorer) on twitter if you have prompts/ideas you'd like to see me write or just to yell and scream abt these two idiots that i love !!!!


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